rubber band

A Game of Fetch

This is Kenzie and she is a mess. I am not sure how else to describe her, because she is unlike any other cat we have shared a home with. She can be the biggest butt ever, and a bit of a bully to the other cats… but she can also be the sweetest and most adorable animal you have ever seen. She sort of vacillates between being an angel and a devil sometimes within the same moment. She likes to help with the laundry… and as you can see here sometimes crawl under the upturned laundry basket. She also gets super obsessive about certain things… for example I really like Red Velvet Muffins from QuikTrip… and apparently so does she. I can wrap up one of the muffin wrappers in several layers and she will go spelunking through the trash can in search of it. When she finally gets it… it is not like she eats it but more certainly rips it to shreds. Another similar obsession is twist ties and rubber bands. We go to the cleaners fairly often and for whatever reason they like to rubber band together sets of wire hangers. I am not sure exactly when it happened but Kenzie started stealing these rubber bands from the closet and running off with them. In fact our living room and bedroom are filled with little caches of rubber bands that she mysteriously “loses” and can then summon up at pretty much any moment when she wants one. I have a feeling if we ever moved out the couch there would be a sea of rubber bands and twist ties laying back there waiting to be rediscovered.

Over time this obsession started to morph and I am not completely sure when it started. Instead of just playing with the rubber band she started returning back to wherever we were at and dropping it next to us. When she first did this I decided to go ahead and toss it away again and see what she would do, and from there… a new game was born. We have a cat that plays fetch, in the truest sense of the word. She will bring us something… and want us to toss it… and then she brings it back and we do this over and over until she gets tired of it. When that happens one of two things will happen… either she will “lose it” and by lose I mean know exactly where it is at all times but decide to stop returning it. Either that or she will just lay down beside me ON the object and want attention. This second cessation of fetch generally means that she just wants a break and will resume fetch in a little bit when she starts nudging the object again. So as a result the highlight of my evening was more or less spending an hour and some change playing fetch with Kenzie, quite possibly the longest running game yet. It was extremely important because my wife was in the bedroom with the doors shut off attempting to bond with Luna, someone I have not really introduced you to yet. As a result I am trying to be elsewhere so that both Kenzie and Allie have a stable and friendly source of attention, and as a result while I tired of the fetch thing about thirty minutes into it… and while my reaction time slowed significantly as I tried to level my Warlock… I kept at it because I knew Kenzie needed someone constantly paying attention to her.

Pandaria Is Maddening

As far as the gaming I was doing while playing fetch … I continued to push my Dwarf Warlock up through the levels. At this point I am sitting at 88 and somewhere in the Townlong Steppes quest chain. I said that Pandaria was maddening and that is mostly because we are in this awkward transitional period of time… where you cannot actually purchase the flight book off the black market auction house. That means you can level an alt and have it fly happily from level 60 until 85… then have this awkward block of 85-90 where you cannot fly, and pick up once again in the 90-100 content. This is a prime example of one of my complaints with World of Warcraft content, in that often times they seem not to take into account the ramifications of changes. Removing the Black Market Auction House until legion… also probably unintentionally blocked players from being able to purchase the level 85 book for flying. The easy fix would have been to simply change the level you can purchase Pandaria Flight from the trainer in the Shrine to 85, and do away with the book. However instead I am stuck in this limbo as I try to level a new army of alts to the current level cap of 100. I realize that I could always purchase boosts to 100 and be done with it… but even though I am taking every shortcut possible, I still enjoy the act of leveling and questing. The mob density in Pandaria just makes that whole process a bit of a slog.

The one thing I am super thankful of however is that while each individual zone is a fairly linear process… they have added quests that unlock zones rather than having to quest your way through one to get to the next. That way when you ding a level you can check the Adventure Guide to get the quest to move on to the next area. This admittedly really speeds up the leveling process, and while I once had this ideal path through Pandaria that mostly still works… it is sped up by no longer needing to clear to a specific quest to unlock the next area. My next big decision however is what to do when I ding 90, and if I want to spend the gold to upgrade my caster heirlooms from 90 to 100. I am highly considering it given that I have two more cloth wearers that have yet to hit 100, so it is not like they won’t see a lot of use in the coming months. Essentially where I am standing on the whole leveling game is that I have my Priest, Mage and Monk that will be sub 100 now that I am zeroing in on getting that Warlock up there. At some point once I get some gear at level 100 I will probably take a lengthy break to finish farming up the remaining cloth that I need to push my tailoring up to a reasonable place for Legion. As to why I am suddenly motivated to play all of these alts… I guess in theory it is because I am constantly seeing new appearance items and creating a stable of appearance farmers for the various armor types. Prior to the Warlock I did not really have a cloth wearer that I enjoyed playing… and as a result don’t have much in the way of cloth appearance gear. After all… the true end game is looking awesome.